That was an interesting comment thread on my New Year's Day post about terrorism and the moral systems of liberals and conservatives. I noticed that several folks wrote in with comments along the lines of these by kattw:

I think the sort of hilarious thing is that the conservatives make a similar argument about liberals: that they want the entire populace to look to the government for support of their daily lives. One of the talking points against a public option in health care reform, for example.

So I guess your choices are: look to the government to help you pay for your daily bread, or look to the government to tell you whether it's allowed to eat your daily bread today, or if you should hide from terrorists instead.

Nicely put. Very interesting thing that when we speak of the subject of "government control over people's lives" most folks probably think not of conservatives and terror alerts but of liberals and taxes or regulations or what have you. I can understand the reasons why this is so, but (as kattw goes on to ask in his/her comment), which is the more coercive form of control?

Again, the types of control liberals and conservatives seek are perfectly reflective of their moral impulses. Liberals want a society that is (as we see it) humane and just and fair. But not only that: we want a society in which people are protected from harming themselves and others.

This goes directly back to Mill's definition of liberty, doesn't it, now that I think about it? With this crucial difference, I guess: Mill was concerned (as I remember it) with people's ability to harm others, while in the modern world, liberalism has taken up the cudgel of the battle against people doing harm to themselves.

The first part, harm to others, is the easy part, at least intellectually. A corporation can't pollute a town's drinking supply and expect not to be punished or regulated. In the real world, corporations fight this tooth and nail, and the Republicans are pretty much unfailingly on their side. So even this is contentious as a matter of real-world politics, even though it should not be.

The second part, harm to self, is a source of ferocious debate with the libertarian right – you know, people should be free to smoke themselves to death or eat all the bacon cheeseburgers they please or not wear seat belts or what have you. And maybe they should. However, there's a big "but" here.

And it's this: in all these cases, there is potential harm visited upon others. There's second-hand smoke in the first case, and in all cases, there are the costs imposed upon society of caring for people who develop emphysema or arteriosclerosis, or who sustain life-threatening injuries in a car crash.

Add all these up over the course of a year and you're talking about billions of dollars. So the modern liberal view has been, the state has a legitimate interest in altering types of behavior that carry societal costs. The moral impulse behind the urge to regulate these behaviors has to do with this idea of a just society, one element of which is that okay, you should have the right to eat bacon cheeseburgers, but society has the right to take steps to discourage this behavior because it imposes costs on society that are (theoretically) unnecessary and would be better spent paying for the college educations of talented but poor children, or whatever.

Conservatives desire a society in which there is order and respect for authority, so the conservative form of control, as I said the other day, manifests itself when there are threats to the social order and to life itself (as conservatives see it). So conservatives wouldn't be as concerned as liberals about the social costs of individual choices, and they'd say eat all the bacon cheeseburgers you want. They would also expect you to be able to pay for your own bypass surgery.

That they don't seem to want to deal with the fact that many people can't, and that society often ends up paying some portion of the freight, is emblematic of what is to me one of the central weaknesses of the conservative world view, which is its quality of abstraction; disconnected-ness from the actual conditions of the world. Sure, everyone should pay for their own bypass surgery. Even I agree with that – who wouldn't?

But everyone can't, and doesn't. So what do we do about it? The conservative answer (on full display these recent months in America) is basically nothing, because a solution requires giving the state more power, and that's the biggest no-no of all. It's completely abstract and ideological. It's a point of view held by allegedly fiscally prudent people that ends up costing society, all societies, billions and billions of dollars.

I'm digressing a bit. To get back to terrorism, preserving order in society is a profound conservative moral impulse. If other impulses clash with it – checks and balances, the Geneva Convention, whatever – so be it. Cheney and others essentially said this, without exactly saying it, many times over during the last eight years. Constitutional and international principles – which conservatives would call abstract, liberals concrete – matter less than preservation of order and life.

And we'd all agree with that up to a point. But the whole fight is over, what's that point?

Anyway, this is why Jonah Goldberg's liberal fascism argument was so cockeyed. The liberal moral impulse behind the liberal form of control is very unlikely to become totalitarian. Banning text-messaging while driving is not going to lead to fascism. It just isn't.

Making people purchase health insurance is controversial, perhaps (although Mitt Romney was for it when he was governor of Massachusetts). But it isn't turning people into servants of the state. It is, instead, a manifestation of liberal moral impulse about the societal costs of harming oneself (i.e. not carrying insurance, and relying on society to pay when major illness strikes).

And taxes aren't slavery. They just aren't. Societies of all sorts accept taxation of all sorts. To say otherwise is radical, and ridiculous.

Like anything, the liberal impulse can go too far, and liberals have to be on guard against that. But its totalitarian risks are comparatively small. The conservative impulse, on the other hand: the need for order seems to me to run directly up against certain core democratic principles, articulated above and the other day. So I say that moral impulse, however respectably intentioned, is more dangerous. The floor is yours.